


Red Wine

by scholarlydragon



Category: Lore Olympus (Webcomic)
Genre: Dream Logic, Fear, Gen, Loneliness, Nightmares, Wine, fleeing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-13
Updated: 2019-08-13
Packaged: 2020-08-20 08:54:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,236
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20225155
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scholarlydragon/pseuds/scholarlydragon
Summary: You can only run so far. Set during, and some dialogue from, Episode 71





	Red Wine

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you to Alulah and Jessy. As so often.
> 
> Suggested soundtrack:  
https://youtu.be/kBLbvnRrGmg  
https://youtu.be/8N_PXTGdlGw

The house is dark.

My footsteps echo down the long hall as I walk, fading ripples of sound my only company. I want to get through this faster, to be done in this place. I am not entirely sure where I am, yet it seems all too horribly familiar. I want to leave.

The rooms yawning open along either side of the corridor seem to almost beg to be checked, to be inspected, but I resist. There’s no point. Somehow I know there won’t be anyone there. That there’s never anyone there. Instinct tells me to keep my eyes on my own feet as I put one foot in front of the other. It seems safest.

The beginnings of a headache lurk somewhere behind my left eye and I am certain that if I could just reach my destination, I could rest. I’ll be damned if I know what it is, though. It seems like I’ve been walking forever. A bone deep emptiness gnaws at me, dragging at every footstep, and I sigh. Never anything different.

The sound of a drip echoes down the hall, discordant with my footsteps and I look up, squinting. Crimson drops fall erratically from the skylight, spattering onto the tile before puddling in a gleaming pool. With a scowl, strangely angry at this intrusion, I reach down and dip my fingers into the liquid and bring it to my lips. Wine. Dark as blood. Red as skin under blue fingers… I wrench away from the thought, knowing that the searing gash of emptiness waits on the other side.

There is a sound of more drips to the left and I turn, looking into one of the rooms for the first time, drawn before I can think to look away. An office. Luxuriously appointed, but skewed. The angles are wrong and unsettling and instinct pulls at me to turn away, to continue my trudge down the corridor. But now that I have looked into the room, I cannot look away. I force myself to enter. Somehow, I need to see what is here. I  _ must _ know.

Ruby-red drops seep from the ceiling here, pattering onto the leather desk chair and soaking into the pages of ancient books. Scarlet spatters soak into yellowed pages, ruining them with unfurled stains. The drops fall faster and faster, tiny cataracts from the ceiling forming rivulets and runnels tracing across the floor. As the streams near my shoes, I am seized by a lurch of fear and I bolt backward, suddenly deeply terrified of what might happen if the growing flood touches me.

Stumbling back out into the hall, I turn to flee, knowing only that I need to get away. The crystalline flood pours now from the skylight and I duck between the sparkling streams, intent on flight. The echo of my footsteps returns faster and faster as I break into a run, fleeing…. I know not what. But the growing flood at my back carries a memory of… I pull away as though burned from an image of mocking, hate-filled eyes.

Ahead, as the corridor bends, I catch sight of a side hall and I dash for it, desperate for any kind of change in this endless place. As I turn the corner however, I stop dead in my tracks, heart hammering. After a span of a dozen steps, the hall ends in blackness. Nothing so simple as lack of light, it is an abyss of nothing and a strangled scream claws from my throat as I realize I know what it is. For the same emptiness dogs my every step, has leered at me from every room I passed in this place. It is a certainty of solitude and the knowledge that there is not, and never will be, anyone there.

My heart racing, my breath heaving in terrified gasps, I turn in a blind panic back to the main hall and duck into the first door I see. It’s a kitchen. Tidy and comfortable, it is strangely welcoming and a deep  _ need _ wells in me to stay in this place. The angles are not skewed here, not twisted. There is no mocking emptiness to the shadows. Except…

The sound of steady drips fills the air and, with growing horror, I realize the sink has filled with the scarlet drops of wine I thought I’d left behind. The jewel bright flood spills onto the counter and I can only watch in horrified fascination. The wine stains the counter and floor as surely as it ruined the books and sharply painful regret pierces me. Somehow, I know I brought this here. In trying to flee, I have ruined this place. As the growing puddle reaches my shoes, there is a roar from behind me and I know that the flood has found me. The drowning deluge I fled and feared has found me. My head tips back and I close my eyes. I cannot flee anymore.

I never stood a chance.

The roaring torrent buffets me off my feet and I am swept away, the pungent wine filling my ears, nose, and eyes. I open my mouth to scream and it fills my lungs as well, burning acridly. Terror suffuses my being as I hang, suspended.

I have been here before. I  _ know _ this place.

The pain and fear and finally numbness of utter solitude. Searing loneliness as hours stretch to days, stretch to years. Suspended in the sea of wine, I curl into a ball, the posture terribly comfortable, horribly familiar. As I feel my clothing melding away into the tattered remnants of my childhood robes, the worn fabric drifting against my skin in the eddies of the wine, I realize a horrible truth. 

I was always meant to come back to this.

Malevolent eyes glitter through the sea that surrounds me and I flail, panicked, desperate to get away from that piercing gaze. But I am shrinking, smaller, a child once more and there is no support in this place. There is no up or down, no way to orient myself. No loving, supportive hands or even an indifferent gesture. 

I am adrift.

Fleeting thoughts of mischievous pink and scarlet eyes skirt though my awareness and I lunge after them, desperate to any sort of connection, but they vanish, as ephemeral as smoke, and the burning eyes are laughing at me.

“Why do you fight what you know is inevitable, insignificant king?” The voice grinds like stones in a mountain’s bones and I curl instinctively once more, filled with a child’s fear of the monster that cannot be bargained away.. “You cannot leave this place. You cannot deny what you know is true.” I shake my head, a frantic, futile gesture, but mocking laughter envelopes me as the terrible voice continues, “Of course she doesn’t want to be around you. You’re just like me.”

There is a corner of my awareness that wants to protest, wants to argue. Somewhere, somehow, I am dimly aware that this mocking voice is my subject, that I am his jailer. But for all the power of holding the keys to the cell, I know I will always be a breath away from this, from the solitude and fear, from the pain. I will always be the terrified, ruined king. And I know, deep in my bones, that my father speaks the truth…

I am just like him.


End file.
